Mythology in the Modern Era: Vampries

Mythology in the Modern Era: Vampires

Ciara Griffiths

Everybody loves a scary story. We tell them in whispered giggles on school camps, and get a kick out of scary movies like five different versions of Paranormal Activity. These days, science and technology have assisted in the complete eradication of any rational need to be afraid of the supernatural. Nowadays if you believe in ghosts and monsters, or are afraid of the dark, it’s labelled by science as phobia, as irrational.

It wasn’t very long ago, however, when you were considered irrational for not being afraid of the dark…and the things inside it. It hasn’t even been 200 years since we first flipped on the electric lights and realised that we’re alone in the room after all, or since we decided farms were more important than forests and whilst cutting them down discovered nothing more than animals. It hasn’t been very long at all since the world believed in more than what the eye could see. It has been long enough, however, for us to forget the reason why we were scared of monsters in the first place.

There are many supposed origins to vampires. Vampires have existed in the oldest memories of countless cultures for ten millennia. From the blood-drinking demon Lilitu, also known as the child-eating Lilith in ancient Mesopotamian and Hebrew mythologies; the Lamia in Greek myth who preyed on the blood of children and young men; to the revenants of medieval Europe – corpses who rose from the dead to torment the living. All of these legends have transformed over time to create the modern ‘romantic’ vampire, a creature who is popularly envisioned as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (when not sparkly and having freaky mutant babies in America).

But how have all of the stereotypical features of vampires come about? Where did we get this image of bloodthirsty hunters, who burn in sunlight and have an affinity for coffins? Tracing back over Stoker’s own process of inspiration can provide some of these answers.

The demon Lilith , in the Garden of Eden

Most will have heard of Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula, a man called ‘Vlad the Impaler’, a man that was as exciting as his nickname suggests. Vlad the Third, also known as Dracula to his friends, was the bloodthirsty prince of Wallachia – renowned for his habit of impaling his enemies and setting up their heads on spikes. Great guy, really. Stoker’s antihero, with similar flair for dramatics, was based on Vlad. However, there is a lesser known inspiration for his novel. This inspiration was a young American girl named Mercy Brown, from Rhode Island.

Mercy Brown and her family lived in the 1800’s, a time where vampire’s had reached such notoriety that the period was dubbed the ‘Great New England Vampire Panic’. During this time, the common belief of ‘vampires’ was that sometimes the dead came back to suck the life out of the living. This particular superstition was greatly exacerbated by a growing epidemic in the late 1800’s. This epidemic was of tuberculosis, named ‘consumption’ at the time due to the symptom of the victim wasting away physically, like they were being consumed. It was Mercy’s mother and sister (both named Mary) that first passed away from consumption, followed a few months later by Mercy herself in the winter of 1890. The ground being too hard to bury her, Mercy’s body was kept in a vault in wait for spring. But when Mercy’s brother, Edwin, began to die of consumption too – the villagers began to suspect greater forces than simple tragedy. They believed that someone was consuming Edwin’s life from beyond the grave.

The villagers in Rhode Island received permission to exhume the bodies of the Brown family in search of proof that one of the three dead women was rising from the grave. Since a great deal of time had passed since their deaths, the two Marys had decomposed, but Mercy was not so lucky. Since Mercy’s body had been kept in the freezing vault for the winter, her body had been perfectly preserved…with blood even found still in her heart. The ‘vampire’ had been discovered. Mercy Brown’s heart was burned, and the ashes were mixed into a tonic to be given to Edwin as a cure for his consumption. Was Edwin saved by this supernatural cure? Nope, he died (unsurprisingly). The Incident of Mercy Brown (as it was later called) inspired pop culture for years to come, and made it into the local news too. Clippings of these newspapers were later found in Stoker’s notes for Dracula, and are thought to have contributed to his book

The unfortunate tale of Mercy Brown had a remarkable flow-on effect. Bram Stoker’s Dracula held a profound impact on pop-culture as we know it. The romanticized vampire struck a chord in modern culture like no other mythical beast; leaving in its wake a revolution in storytelling. How remarkable to think that sparkly dipshits like Edward Cullen are a culmination of ten thousand years of storytelling. Demonstrating how prominent this one creature has been in the human psyche throughout all written history.